Being Community With Creation
by Harold Vanicek, pastor
“To be whole. To be complete. Nature reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.”
Terry Tempest Williams
Harold and the honeybees
Each time I visit the bee yard to check on “my” honey bees, I am both delighted and surprised they are still there. They could easily decide to find new homes, but continue to commit to being in community with me and the wild acreage surrounding Trinity Episcopal Church and community garden in Marble Falls.
One of my favorite authors, Indigenous pastor Randy Woodley, talks about the “community of creation” when he gives color and texture to “beloved community”…to what the “kingdom of God” looks and feels like in its most expansive form. I am more and more drawn to community that includes humans WITH creation, not just humans IN creation.
Harold and son harvesting honey
Honeybees are shepherding me in ways of becoming more fully human and neighbor. They have taught me some of their language and ways of living with the earth around them. Their language is as challenging to learn as any human language. It takes quantity and quality time together. It takes humility and patience. It takes love and grace (especially when you get stung for not listening).
Honeybees have taught me about community in all the fascinating ways they practice community. They have helped me see how connected I am to everything - neighbor human, neighbor pollinator, neighbor tree…stream…rock…and air. In their daily buzz I hear the mantra - “All is alive. All is connected. All is intelligent. All is relative/family.”
Pastor Harold giving a blessing on Blessing of the Animals Sunday
Last summer, I stepped away from pastoring full-time in the congregation to follow a growing sense of call from God to the intersection of church and creation. I believe a central piece of what it means to be church is to be beloved community that includes and fully joins with creation in being community together - not creation as merely background scenery or flowers on the altar.
Is not the rock outside your door, the nearby stream, the very air we breathe as full of the grace and life of God as you and me?
The geologian Thomas Berry once said, “We will go into the future as one sacred community, or we will all perish in the desert.” Berry believed God created all things to be in participatory community. Anything exploitative not only harms community, but the entire earth.
A faint trace of the milky way taken outside Harold’s house
In addition to serving as transitional pastoral with Spirit in the Hills in Spicewood, I am also volunteering with The Ark of the Highland Lakes, training to be a Master Naturalist, and helping organize a Friends of the Night Sky group for Burnet County through The Hill Country Alliance; I’m participating in the work to build places that encourage humans to reconnect with sacred earth and practice being beloved community.